Product & Prototyping Lead

InvestCloud, Inc.; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 100,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive base salary

Discretionary bonus

Excellent pension

Private medical

Life assurance

28 days holiday plus bank holidays

Job summary

InvestCloud, Inc. is seeking a Product & Prototyping Lead to bridge the gap between strategy, product, and engineering. The role focuses on turning strategic questions into tangible prototypes, maintaining alignment across teams, and utilizing modern tools to facilitate quick iterations.

Candidates should have 4-8 years of experience in product or technical roles, with strong prototyping and communication skills. A hybrid working model is offered along with competitive compensation and benefits.

Qualifications

• Typically 4–8 years’ experience in a product, technical product, or product-engineering role.
• Skilled at extracting genuine insight from stakeholder conversations.
• Able to operate without a defined playbook, bringing structure to loosely-defined problems.

Responsibilities

• Translate high-level strategic goals into product problems worth solving.
• Run structured discovery with PMN Ops, Product, and Engineering.
• Build functional prototypes quickly to learn from.

Skills

Strong product instincts

Hands-on prototyping ability

Technical fluency

Comfort with modern tooling

Discovery and user research

Demo and communication skills

Comfortable with ambiguity

Job description

InvestCloud is a private‑equity backed platform business supporting over $6 trillion of assets globally, with deep, long‑standing relationships across the asset and wealth management ecosystem. Private markets are rapidly becoming a core part of wealth portfolios – but the industry infrastructure has not kept pace. Most wealth managers still rely on manual processes, fragmented data, and operational workarounds to deliver private market exposure.

InvestCloud’s Private Markets Network (PMN) is designed to change that. PMN is a network‑level execution and processing platform that enables private market investments to be delivered at managed‑account scale, with the same operational discipline and integration model that wealth managers expect in public markets.

Purpose of the Role

PMN moves fast and operates across complex, interconnected domains. Strategy, product, and technology each have their own language – and too often, things get lost in translation between them. This role exists to close that gap.

The Product & Prototyping Lead takes fuzzy strategic questions and operational pain points and turns them into working prototypes that teams can learn from, react to, and build on. They are equally comfortable in a whiteboard session with leadership and a hands‑on build session with engineers – and they know how to move quickly between the two.

What You’ll Actually Be Doing

• Sitting with PMN Ops or Product to get to the bottom of a real problem – and leaving with a clear plan for what to build next.
• Building a working prototype to test an idea before anyone has written a spec.
• Running a demo with senior stakeholders and extracting the signal from their reaction.
• Turning a messy strategic question into a concrete experiment with a clear pass/fail.
• Helping engineering understand not just what to build, but why – and what success looks like.
• Telling the team clearly and early when something isn’t working – and redirecting to what will.
• Keeping strategy, product, and engineering aligned without creating process overhead.

Key Responsibilities

Bridging Strategy, Product & Technology

• Act as the connective tissue between PMN’s strategic direction, product priorities, and engineering execution.
• Translate high‑level strategic goals into product problems worth solving, and product problems into things engineers can build.
• Help PMN leadership make better decisions by giving them something tangible to react to rather than abstract options.
• Maintain a clear, honest view of what’s feasible – and push back constructively when strategy outpaces reality.

Discovery & Problem Definition

• Run structured discovery with PMN Ops, Product, and Engineering to surface the highest‑value opportunities.
• Turn vague pain points and strategic ambitions into well‑defined problem statements with clear success criteria.
• Maintain a prioritised opportunity backlog with transparent impact/effort reasoning.
• Make confident calls on what not to pursue – and articulate why clearly.

Rapid Prototyping

• Build functional prototypes quickly – good enough to learn from, not necessarily to ship.
• Use modern tooling – including the latest AI to compress the time from idea to something testable.
• Design each prototype around a specific question: what do we need to learn, and what’s the fastest way to learn it?
• Know when a prototype has done its job and move on.

Demo, Alignment & Iteration

• Run compelling, well‑structured demos to internal stakeholders and leadership.
• Use demos as an alignment tool – to surface disagreements, sharpen requirements, and build conviction.
• Extract clear signal from stakeholder feedback; translate it into sharper problem definitions or go/no‑go decisions.
• Iterate quickly; treat each cycle as an opportunity to learn, not just to refine.

Handoff to Engineering

• Define what “validated and ready to build” looks like: outcomes, acceptance criteria, data requirements, integration points.
• Stay close through early build to ensure the intent of the prototype is preserved.

Essential Skills & Experience

• Strong product instincts: able to frame ambiguous problems into clear outcomes, make confident prioritisation decisions, and define what good looks like.
• Hands‑on prototyping ability: comfortable building working demos and proof‑of‑concept tools independently – not just writing specs for others.
• Technical fluency: enough engineering depth to work credibly alongside developers, understand trade‑offs, and prototype against real systems and data – without needing to own production code.
• Comfort with modern tooling: familiar with the current landscape of AI, no‑code, and low‑code tools; picks up new ones quickly.
• Discovery and user research: skilled at extracting genuine insight from stakeholder conversations; able to distinguish between what people say and what they actually need.
• Demo and communication skills: able to run structured, compelling demos and translate technical concepts clearly for senior, non‑technical audiences.
• Comfortable with ambiguity: able to operate without a defined playbook, bring structure to loosely‑defined problems, and make progress under uncertainty.
• Typically 4–8 years’ experience in a product, technical product, or product‑engineering role.

Desirable Skills & Experience

• Experience in financial services, B2B SaaS, or other regulated or data‑sensitive environments.
• Exposure to private markets, wealth platforms, or operations tooling.
• Prior experience acting as a bridge between product and engineering in fast‑moving environments.
• Familiarity with data pipelines, APIs, or operational systems – enough to prototype against real data sources.
• Experience running structured discovery or design sprint processes.

Personal Attributes

• Shows rather than tells – defaults to a working prototype over a slide deck.
• Moves fluidly between strategic thinking and hands‑on building; neither feels like a step down.
• Energised by iteration; not precious about ideas that aren’t working.
• High conviction, low ego – changes their mind when the evidence points that way.
• Keeps moving when things are ambiguous; brings clarity rather than waiting for it.
• Earns trust quickly across different audiences – from ops teams to the executive level.

About InvestCloud

InvestCloud, a global leader in wealth technology, aspires to enable a smarter financial future. Driving the digital transformation of the wealth management industry, the company serves a broad array of clients globally, including Wealth and Asset Managers, Wirehouses, Banks, RIAs, and Insurers. In terms of scale, the company’s clients represent more than 40 percent of the $132 trillion of total assets globally. As a leader in delivering personalization and scale across advisory programs, including unified managed accounts (UMA) and separately managed accounts (SMA), the company is committed to the success of its clients. By equipping and enabling advisors and their clients with connected technology, enhanced intelligence, and inspired experiences, InvestCloud delivers leading digital wealth management and financial planning solutions, complemented by a dynamic data warehouse, which scale across the complete wealth continuum. In 2024, InvestCloud was named CNBC World’s Top Fintech Company, a proof point of the company’s commitment to innovation and client success. Headquartered in the United States, InvestCloud serves clients around the world. For more information, visit InvestCloud.com.

Our Values

• Client Connected
• Human Centered
• Technology Forward
• Respect + Integrity
• Excellence

Compensation & Benefits

• Competitive base salary
• Discretionary bonus
• Excellent pension, private medical, life assurance
• Hybrid working model
• 28 days holiday plus bank holidays

The actual salary will vary based on the applicant’s education, experience, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity and alignment with market data. The salary may also be adjusted based on the applicant’s geographic location.